Another Chance for Mone’t

By LIZ ROBBINS

Published: May 5, 2013

CORRECTION APPENDED

The end of the road is a yellow brick house in East New York, Brooklyn, that was once a rectory. Mone’t arrived there on Dec. 28 with a bad attitude and four years of baggage.

In and out of the Queens courts for fighting and using marijuana, Mone’t, 17, seemed headed to Rikers Island to be charged as an adult. Then a judge placed her in a new program called Close to Home, the centerpiece of an overhaul by the city and the state of the juvenile justice system.

“I don’t want to be in and out of jail; it’s not me, I can’t do it,” Mone’t (pronounced mo-NAY) said recently in the yellow brick home, the Shirley Chisholm House, where she is one of 11 female teenage residents. (She is identified by only her middle name to protect her privacy.)

On this day, Mone’t wore her short hair dyed deep strawberry, a color as sweet as her smile and as fiery as the emotions she is trying to control. “I want to be home with my family,” she added.

That is the premise behind Close to Home, which Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed into law a year ago. Adolescents from New York City committing acts of delinquency — turnstile jumping, obstructing justice, fighting — no longer are sent upstate to institutions, places so isolated that families or lawyers found it difficult to visit. Instead, the young people have local options now, ranging from community probation programs to residential houses.

In the first eight months, with 400 youths in residential placement, there have been setbacks: 40 arrests, and 73 adolescents who left homes without permission for longer than a day. Over all, 15 young people were placed in secure detention centers to await trials, according to the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, which oversees the program. There have been injuries to staff members and damage to property.

There have also been successes: 90 youths completed their sentences (an average of seven months), and nearly every resident is earning credits with the city’s Education Department, something that is impossible upstate. Only three teenagers were sent to higher-security institutions.

“We have to make it work,” said Tamara A. Steckler, who runs the Legal Aid Society’s juvenile rights practice. In 2009, the New York City branch of the society sued the state’s Office of Children and Family Services for the poor conditions and lack of mental health services at youth prisons.

“There are so many reasons why it’s better to have these kids down in New York City near their families, their communities and their attorneys,” Ms. Steckler added. “And all of those factors outweigh the growing pains we’re having now. Going back to what we had is not an option.”

An anguished cry pierced the anxious air inside the Chisholm House on a recent Friday afternoon. A 14-year-old resident bounded down the stairs, burst through the dining room and flipped over wooden chairs. She tore posters off the walls and tossed framed motivational pictures to the floor — one shattered, leaving broken pieces of the frame on the ground.

A female supervisor, Nadia Edwards, rushed to restrain the girl and hold her arms behind her back. Mone’t joined other residents in the dining room, imploring their friend to calm down.

The girl screamed, “Get off of me!” and ran into the kitchen. A male supervisor, Minas Abraha, held her in a corner.

Within 10 minutes, four police officers from the 75th Precinct arrived. The girl’s outburst had been provoked by a conversation with her mother, who had refused to sign off on a weekend pass. They did not arrest her, but took her by ambulance to a hospital for an overnight psychological observation. As she waited sullenly by the door, the girl put on lip gloss.

Three residents swept up the debris, rearranged the chairs and apologized to visitors who had witnessed the destructive scene.

What would the old Mone’t have done? “The exact same thing,” she said, shaking her head. “Probably even worse.”

Mone’t grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, with her younger sister, mother and a man she considers her stepfather. Her father was in prison. She was first arrested at age 13, accused of having a role in an assault, according to her mother, Antionette Grace, 35. Mone’t started missing school, “running the streets,” she said, and smoking pot; she witnessed a shooting at a party that left her best friend paralyzed.

In November 2011, Mone’t was arrested in a scuffle with a school safety officer at Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, and her case was sent to Family Court. Her mother, who works at a Long Island City law office, said she left so often to deal with Mone’t’s crises that she struggled to cover the rent.

Last July, a grandmother, with whom Mone’t had been very close, died. The teenager’s mother, unable to control her, felt it best for Mone’t to be away. Mone’t entered a residential drug treatment program in Yorktown, in Westchester County.

Five months later, when Mone’t and her mother appeared in court for the school scuffle, the judge agreed to relocate Mone’t to Brooklyn.

“We’ve been through too much already,” Ms. Grace said, picking Mone’t up for a weekend, “this has to be the last stop.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An article last Sunday about a new program that gives young delinquents in New York City local options for rehabilitation, including group homes — instead of incarceration upstate — misidentified, in some editions, the agency that had contracted with Good Shepherd Services, which operates one such home. It is the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, not the state’s Office of Children and Family Services.